Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Headlines - Wednesday

Final debate tonight!

Taegan Goddard reports that John McCain confirmed yesterday that he would try to bring up William Ayers at the debate. McCain appeared to blame Obama for the move:

In an interview on a St. Louis radio station, McCain said Obama's comments that "I didn't have the guts" to talk about William Ayers in the last presidential debate have "probably ensured" that the former 1960s radical will come up in Wednesday's debate.

I for one am hoping he does bring it up.

And then I hope Obama counters with this:

William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.

Oh, and the guy was also involved with the oil-for-food scandal, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac too:

GOP phone-jamming guru James Tobin indicted on two counts of making false statements to the FBI.

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Forrest Gump explains the bailout

Mortgage Backed Securities are like boxes of chocolates. Criminals on Wall Street steal chocolates from the boxes and replace them with turds. Their criminal buddies at Standard & Poor rate these boxes AAA Investment Grade chocolates. These boxes are then sold all over the world to investors. Eventually somebody bites into a turd and discovers the crime. Suddenly nobody trusts American chocolates anymore worldwide.

Hank Paulson now wants the American taxpayers to buy and hold all these turd-infested boxes for $700 billion dollars until the turd market returns to normal. Meanwhile, Hank's buddies, the Wall Street criminals who stole all the good chocolates are not being investigated, arrested, or indicted.

Mama always said: 'Sniff the chocolates first, Forrest.'

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Another McCain-Palin supporter calls for assassinating Barack Obama at a Palin rally in Scranton.

The Alaska Daily News has an editorial on Palin's insane response to Troopergate, and it's a classic:

Sarah Palin's reaction to the Legislature's Troopergate report is an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation. She claims the report "vindicates" her. She said that the investigation found "no unlawful or unethical activity on my part." Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian.

The state Personnel Board investigation of Gov. Sarah Palin's firing of Walt Monegan has broadened to include other ethics complaints against the governor and examination of actions by other state employees, according to the independent counsel handling the case.

Fun fact: Since last Friday, Fox News has mentioned ACORN 342 times, according to Media Matters. It's all ACORN all the time over there (which by itself should tell you a little bit about the credibility of the allegations of widespread voter fraud).

And just who is Fox using as a voting expert? Hans Von Spakovsky. You remember him, don't you? He's the former official in the Bush Justice Department who got a recess appointment to the FEC but whose nomination failed to get through the Senate because he's made a career of finding ways to restrict access to the polls.

The New York Times has an interesting profile of the man who is credited with fueling the false stories that Obama is a Muslim. What has been astonishing for many of us is that being a Muslim would even be an issue — even if it were true. What is even more astonishing is the man who has appeared on national television pandering this story. Andy Martin, 62, is someone barred from a court for frivolous lawsuits, barred from becoming a practicing lawyer for mental problems, and accused of hateful and antisemitic ravings in the past. He was just on Fox News as part of a story on Obama's possible secret Muslim identity.

"'I'm Scared For Me And My Family.' So sayeth a Guantanamo Bay military commissions trial prosecutor who is blowing the whistle, ever so faintly. He is right to be scared. Whistle-blowers die, and their families suffer. Their lives are ruined, because the American way is to isolate, ridicule, defame, ostracize and then withhold all opportunity for the damned whistle-blower to obtain a job and to be included in the very society for which he or she took such risks to advocate."

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The rehabilitation of John McCain

It looks increasingly likely that the McCain-Palin ticket will go down to a crushing defeat three weeks from today. One perennial trope of American political journalism is that once a presidential candidate has gone down in flames, an explosion of sentimentality (edited to add: in the immediate aftermath of the election; in the long term he tends to be remembered as simply a loser) tends to cloak him in virtues that seemed invisible during the campaign itself. This is likely to be especially true of McCain, who, despite the many confessions of disillusionment his unusually sleazy campaign has elicited from his former admirers throughout the media, can still call upon a deep well of residual affection in the press.

So, the question arises, what narrative will be forged to forgive McCain's egregious sins? My guess is that one strand of it will reflect the theme of Jorge Luis Borges' story Three Versions of Judas. McCain, it will be discovered, is so honorable that, in a display of honor greater than any ever witnessed before in American political life, he completely sacrificed his own personal honor for what he understood to be the sake of his country.

In other words, for such an honorable man to have engaged in such dishonorable conduct was, in a way, the last full measure of devotion an honorable man can manifest. If you think about it very, very carefully, by completely sacrificing what is most precious to him (his personal honor), the truly honorable man is being more honorable than the less honorable man, who remains unwilling to sacrifice his honor at the altar of patriotism.

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

Nobody cares. Are you an American? You live in a country that tortures people as official policy (no, the present tense is not a careless mistake), it's your responsibility. That is how the world sees us. And we will - not may, will - pay a heavy price for our failure of outrage when this first started to ooze out. Even those of us, like myself, who spoke out loudly in opposition? Yes.

For more on what each and every one of us will be held accountable for, read Jane Mayer's book. This should be assigned reading for every senior in high school, to impress upon kids that under no circumstances should the government of the United States be permitted to degenerate into a torture regime again.

Ever.

This is beyond the Yamashita Standard, where a commander is culpable for the wrongdoing of his subordinates, if the commander knew or should have known of the crimes. This is direct, provable knowledge and ratification of war crimes by the Bush Administration.

If they want to stay out of prison, the senior officials of the Bush Administration would be well advised to turn in their passports and to forget about ever traveling abroad after January 20, 2009.

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While Palin's down here in the Lower 48 trying to get her crowds to think that Barack Obama is in league with Muslim terrorists, the Russians have landed in Anchorage. According to Bloomberg, more or less the entire senior management of the Russian oil and gas monopoly Gazprom just showed up in Alaska to meet with Palin's Department of Natural Resources and the CEO of ConocoPhillips to see if they can get in on that big pipeline projects she keeps bragging about that she says is going to lead us to energy independence.

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McCain's erratic campaigning "leaves some puzzled" as the Trainwreck Express jack-knifes in the space of just two minutes:

Then came the event in Wilmington, N.C., held at -- irony alert! -- Cape Fear Community College. McCain stood in front of the crowd and said he would take questions or comments after he delivered his remarks. He finished his prepared speech and tacked on a longtime stump story about the bracelet he wears. But then the music and handshaking began. No questions or comments to be heard -- at least those directed at the senator.

"I thought this was a town hall meeting?" a man asked the press corpse.